Intersection of reality and fiction in art perception: pictorial space, body sway and mental imagery

Background The thesis of embodied cognition claims that perception of the environment entails a complex set of multisensory processes which forms a basis for the agent’s potential and immediate actions. However, in the case of artworks, an agent becomes an observer and action turns into a reaction. This raises questions about the presence of embodied or situated cognition involved in art reception. Aims The study aimed to assess the bodily correlates of perceiving fictional pictorial spaces in the absence of a possibility of an actual physical immersion or manipulation of represented forms. Method The subjects were presented with paintings by Vermeer and De Hooch, whilst their body sway and eye movements were recorded. Moreover, test and questionnaires on mental imagery (MRT, VVIQ and OSIQ) were administered. Results Three major results were obtained: (1) the degree of pictorial depth did not influence body sway; (2) fixations to distant elements in paintings (i.e. backgrounds) were accompanied by an increase in body sway; and (3) mental rotation test scores correlated positively with body sway. Conclusions Our results suggest that in certain cases— despite the fictional character of art—observers’ reactions resemble reactions to real stimuli. It is proposed that these reactions are mediated by mental imagery (e.g. mental rotation) that contributes to the act of representing alternative to real artistic spaces

Nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling in Majorana’s stellar representation

By representing the evolution of a quantum state with the trajectories of the stars on a Bloch sphere, the Majorana's stellar representation provides an intuitive way to understand quantum motion in a high dimensional projective Hilbert space. In this work we show that the Majorana's representation offers a very interesting and intuitive way to understand the nonlinear Landau-Zener tunneling. In particular, the breakdown of adiabaticity in this tunneling phenomenon can be understood as some of the stars never reaching the south pole. We also establish a connection between the Majorana stars in the second quantized model and the single star in the mean field model by using the reduced density matrix.National Fundamental Research Program of China [2011CB921501, 2012CB921300, 2013CB921900]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [61027016, 61078026, 10934010, 91336103, 11274024, 11334001, 11429402, 11405008]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2412015KJ009]SCI(E)[email protected]